Crush on You (30 page)

“I’m just making the point,” she mumbled, aware of her pettiness, but powerless to stop it, “that you don’t need to personally fix every leaky faucet and faulty light. You could just donate some money or something.”

She heard his sigh from across the room. “Why are we fighting?”

“I don’t know.” Moody, miserable, she idly nudged the rock paperweight.

“Well, whatever, whyever, let’s get over it, huh? I’m only here until Sunday, and I don’t want to be constantly trading snipes these few short days left.”

His words didn’t sink in as she stared at the check anchored to the desk. Oh, wouldn’t you know. It was made out to the kids’ club. Five figures. A personal check signed by Penn.

Great, now she felt both crabby
and
small. Wait . . . what had he just said? Short. A few short days left. Something cramped inside her at the spot between her breasts.

“You’re . . . you’re going?” She should be relieved, she thought. Even if she was stuck here with him now, soon he’d be gone for good.

“On Sunday. But don’t worry, until then I’ll be available for any emergency fixes at the cottage.”

“My personal handyman.”

He pressed the rheostat on, off, then spun the dial. It didn’t stutter or blink, but performed without a flaw. Shoving the screwdriver in his back pocket, he turned to face her. A faint smile crossed his face. “Like I told you, I’m good with my hands.”

She tilted her head, struck by a new thought. “How come?”

He headed for the sink at the back of the room. “How come I’m good with my hands? I’m guessing you don’t want to hear about those Lights Out parties I went to in seventh grade.”

Seventh grade? Yeesh. “No. I’m being serious.”

“In college, I got a bachelor’s in Commercial Construction,” he said, fiddling with the faucet handle. “But my real education came from living in a sequence of crappy apartments. On TV they have supers in tool belts who live in the building. In real life, you better learn to fix the toilet and sink yourself. And if you’re poor, the toaster, the TV the neighbor’s throwing out, and the hole in the drywall the cockroaches are using as a hallway.”

Alessandra repressed her shudder. She thought of Liam and Seth who had grown up with luxuries and comfort. Without cockroaches. “It would be natural to resent your half brothers,” she mused aloud.

“What?” He turned to face her. “No. It’s no more their fault than mine who contributed half our DNA and how Calvin Bennett handled that.”

“You must have wanted a father.”

He shrugged. “I made one up. Yeah, I felt the lack when the other kids in school had dads to talk about—even if their folks were divorced. So I created one of my own. He was a soldier, stationed in Hawaii, which made him too far away to visit.”

“Hawaii?” she repeated with a little laugh.

Penn shrugged again. “Might as well have been Timbuktu as far as my mom’s ability to pay for airline tickets was concerned. Plus it sounded exotic. Waikiki. Diamond Head. Pearl Harbor.”

Poor kid. Though she knew Penn the successful television star wouldn’t welcome her pity, she couldn’t help but feel for Penn-the-boy, who had learned to fix things in his world as best he could. Another ache had her rubbing her chest and she bowed her head, exhausted by the emotional overload. Since the day he’d shown up in her life, she felt as if she’d been swinging between depression and delight, never quite finding her balance.

Would that sensation go away when he did?

Because he
was
going away. In a few short days.

Her head lifted. “You’ll be back though, right? You don’t blame Liam and Seth, so you’ll be back for weekends, holidays . . .” Her words died off as she read the answer on his face. “You’re leaving Edenville forever?”

“This is not my place, Alessandra. I’ve got a job, a life in L.A.”

“But here you have family. The Bennett businesses, even Tanti Baci—”

“No.”

Her head was hurting again, her chest aching, and she didn’t understand why. “This place—”

“Is beautiful,” he said softly. “But it’s not mine.”

She kept coming back to the same thing, despite what he said. “You have brothers. You can’t go back and pretend you don’t know about them, that they’re not your flesh and blood.”

“I told you I like them. And I’m sure a sentimental soul like yourself thinks it would be nice if we meshed into a family unit. Maybe for a moment I thought so, too. But the truth is, I don’t do ‘nice,’ Alessandra. My mother was ‘nice’ and look where that got her. I was ‘nice’ to Lana—” He broke off. “Let’s just say that in my personal dictionary, ‘nice’ is spelled c-h-u-m-p.”

“Lana.” There it was, she decided, the source of all her aggravation. The vapid blonde and Penn’s passion for her—despite his ability to get passionate with Alessandra on occasion—made her want to break something.

He crossed to the cardboard box at the front of the room and dumped the tool kit he’d used back inside. “Are you ready to go?”

They were in his truck and almost home before she trusted her voice. The man was lovesick, and she was mad instead of understanding about it. What kind of . . .
friend
did that make her?

“You don’t want to ever come back here because of Lana,” she said, bringing it out in the open as he braked in front of her farmhouse. “Seeing her here with Roger, it makes Tanti Baci the place where your heart was broken.”

Silence reined in the dark cab. “Oh, God,” he finally groaned. “What a sap you are. Is that the silly story you’re telling yourself?”

She bristled. “It’s not my fault you fell in love with the wrong woman.”

There was another long silence, then he groaned again. “Jesus, Alessandra. You gotta use your head instead of your marshmallow heart, honey.”

There it was again. Everyone always considering her a sentimental fool. If only they knew . . . She unlatched her seat belt, desperate to get away from him now. She shouldn’t be around him anymore. “Never mind. I’m out of—”

“No, you’re not.” In a sudden movement, he hauled her across the bench seat. “Not until we get this straight.”

“Get what straight?” she said, trying to slide toward her door.

He groaned again. His voice lowered. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”

Alessandra froze. Telling her what?
Telling her what?
All evening she’d been wishing herself away from him. Now, nothing could make her leave.

I can’t believe I’m telling you this.
The words echoed in Penn’s head. He shouldn’t tell her anything because that might lead to the one thing she could never know.

“Never mind,” he said, removing his hand from her arm and nudging her toward the passenger door.

She sat unmoving on the seat beside him, her thigh two inches from his. “Never mind? You’re kidding me. You can’t say that.”

“I just did.”

He would have laughed at the way she flounced on the seat, except she ended up closer to his side. The full fabric of her skirt brushed over his leg and a long lock of her flower-scented hair clung to his shirt sleeve.

“It’s one of the first rules of sibling-hood,” Alessandra replied. “Maybe you don’t know it, since you grew up as an only child. But the fact is, you can’t start to tell something and then renege.”

“I’m not your sibling,” he pointed out, “so your little rule doesn’t apply.”

“The Bennetts grew up next door to us,” she countered. “Our families have been partners for a hundred years. You’re almost like my brother.”

He choked on that.

She thumped him between the shoulder blades. “See? It’s not healthy to hold things back.”

God, he loved her. He was never going to get to have her, and he was going to miss like hell how she made him laugh. Her fist was still pounding on him and he had to twist and reach back to enclose it in one of his own. “I like my lungs right where they are.”

Alessandra’s hand in his felt so damn right. He touched his forehead to hers, driven by the need to touch her, to have of her what he could until he went away. Her stifled-sneeze response to good sex was still something to be overcome, after all.

“Honey,” he said, and then kissed her nose, her mouth, each of her cheeks. “I just had a great idea. You’ve got nothing to do tonight, I’ve got nothing to do tonight . . .”

“So you’ve got no excuse not to finish what you started to tell me.”

Stubborn woman. He tried kissing it away, doing his best to be coaxing and not demanding.

She was clutching his shoulders, but still not capitulating. “Penn—”

“Think about it, my lady. When’s the next time an iterant tinker is going to arrive in the enchanted forest to fill all the holes”—she stiffened—“in your cookware? It could be a long time before another strong and silent type comes around to service you . . . I mean your castle.”

Her eyes rolled. “You are ridiculous.”

“But even after all your earlier sniping, you say that with fondness,” he pointed out, a finger tapping the end of her nose. “And don’t forget, there’s still those velvet handcuffs.”

His mouth touched hers again. Sweet, with just a swipe of tongue against her lower lip. “We could play some
very
adult games with them.”

Her breath hitched. That word,
adult
, always got her. An image filled his head: a big bed, a television, Alessandra, and an adult film. He had to haul in a deep breath to keep from hauling her into his arms. “Alessandra?”

“Um . . .”

She was glancing up at him through her lashes, the little flirt. “Only if you tell me your secret.”

His secret? God, no.

“About Lana . . .” she started.

He groaned, then a far off ringing phone startled them both. They looked around, Alessandra groping for her purse, Penn putting his hand over his pocket where his cell phone sat. Then she frowned.

“It’s the house’s landline.” She was already sliding across the bench seat. “Nobody ever calls that anymore.”

Of course he followed her inside. After all, it got him that much closer to her bed and those handcuffs. The wall phone in her old-fashioned kitchen had stopped ringing, but he didn’t mind, except that she was frowning again. And then looking annoyed at the cell phone she dug out of her purse. “I turned it off during your talk,” she said. “Maybe whoever called here left a message on my cell phone first.”

“Let’s forget whoever called you,” he said. “Let’s forget about everything but us.”
Of course there is no ‘us,’
he reminded himself, even as he took her in his arms.

She didn’t seem to notice, because her attention was still focused on her cell. “Clare called a couple of times,” she said, then glanced at the big-faced school clock hanging across the room. “It’s not too late.”

“It’s much too late,” Penn murmured, shuffling her toward the staircase.

This is when that chemistry thing was such a boon. He could read the objections and reservations on her face, but he could distract her from them by trailing his fingertip across her cheek. Sucking on her bottom lip. Caressing the small of her back as they ascended the stairs.

And the gods were smiling on him, because those furry handcuffs were tossed on the antique ash dresser she had angled in one corner of her room. He snagged them as he slow-danced her toward the bed, her mouth going soft under his.

Pressing her to the mattress, he dropped them between the pillows. She looked up at him through slumberous eyes. So dark, and their exotic tilt made her look mysterious. Except she wasn’t. He knew her to her marrow.

Alessandra Baci. The darling of Edenville. Tommy’s girl. The Nun of Napa, devoting herself to grief and one boy’s memory. It was all true, and remembering it made him feel as if someone was taking a log splitter to his chest. Still, Penn couldn’t take his gaze off her.

She stretched luxuriously, her arms overhead. The movement lifted the frilly little shirt she was wearing, exposing a wedge of her golden-skinned belly. He went down on his knees beside the bed, distracting himself from the pain by placing a string of kisses from rib to rib.

Wiggling, she laughed. “That tickles.”

“It won’t when you’re naked.”

She believed such outrageous things. Maybe it was part of her romantic soul. In any case, she let him undress her, until her clothes were flung aside and it was only Alessandra, bare, on the white sheets.

His heart seized.

Her phone rang, a distinctive tune. The
Star Trek
theme.

“Clare,” Alessandra said, her head rolling toward her cell, lying on the bedside table beside her purse.

“I should—”

She yelped as he yanked her by the ankles, down to the edge of the mattress. He went back to his position on the floor and then used his fingers to open her for his mouth.